Sam Altman returns as CEO, OpenAI has a new initial board
openai.com
openai.com
"I think this is going to be the greatest leap forward that we've had yet so far, and the greatest leap forward of any of the big technological revolutions we've had so far. so i'm super excited, i can't imagine anything more exciting to work on. and on a personal note, like four times now in the history of openai, the most recent time was just in the last couple of weeks, i've gotten to be in the room when we sort of like push the front, this sort of the veil of ignorance back and the frontier of discovery forward. and getting to do that is like the professional honor of a lifetime. so that's just, it's so fun to get to work on that."
Finally, when asked what surprises may be announced by the company next year, Sam had this to say
"The model capability will have taken such a leap forward that no one expected." - "Wait, say it again?" "The model capability, like what these systems can do, will have taken such a leap forward, no one expected that much progress." - "And why is that a remarkable thing? Why is it brilliant? " "Well, it's just different to expectation. I think people have in their mind how much better the model will be next year, and it'll be remarkable how much different it is. " - "That's intriguing."
Humans "have their own motives" because we're designed to reproduce. We're designed to reproduce because anything that didn't, over billions of years, no longer exists today.
Why on earth would an artifact produced by gradient descent have its own motives?
This is just an absurd consequence of extrapolating from a sample size of one. The only intelligent thing we know of is humans, humans have their own motives, therefore all intelligent things have their own motives. It's bogus.
“i am a programmer and autistic. please only answer my question, no sidetracking”
and i have had a well heeled helper since
Personally not a fan of this.
there is some complex definition for AGI that exists, but the fact laypeople cant make the determination, will always result in the GP comment
I don't have a strong opinion either way, but I'm not convinced by the "secret sauce" / internal monologue school of intelligence.
If we want to be pragmatic, we should just think about smart tests and just assume it's intelligent if the system passes those tests. It's what we do with other people (I don't really know if they feel inside like I do, but given they are the same biological beings, it sounds quite likely)
I can't imagine. It will take higher education, for instance, years to catch up with the current SOTA. At the same time, I can imagine — it would be like using chatGPT now, but where it actually finishes the job. I find myself having to redo everything I do with ChatGPT to such an extent that it rarely saves time. It does broaden my perspective, though.
They also should have known about the advancements so saying this in public isn’t consistent with him not being candid.
One other, was by one of the other execs on stage on categorization of the types of risks people discuss with AI vs lumping everything together under "safety". https://youtu.be/ZFFvqRemDv8?t=1430
1. GPT outputs - Toxic, bias or non-factual
2. System Usage - misinformation, disinformation, impersonation (ex voice)
3. Society/Work - Impacts on workforce, education, replacing jobs, decision making
4. Safety - The more sci-fi style safety discussion.
It's a very insightful point to call out, and something I never see discussed with the same rigor / granularity here on HN. People often pick their strawman from the list and argue for or against all 4 using that one.
Thought this was an interesting interview. I do love how politicians use an investigation to not answer questions, the board said he was “not consistently candid” and given the opening question of “why were you fired?” still not being clearly answered, you’d have to agree with their initial assessment.
I’m not sure I trust someone who has tried to set up a crypto currency that scans everyone’s eyeballs as a feature, personally, but that’s just me I guess.
might as well just call it "line goes up"
No matter how idealistic you are, you won't be happy when your compensation is reduced from 600k to 200k.
Because he's the one who's promising to make them all rich.
It isn't clear to anyone else either.
I think where they really screwed up was in being unwilling or unable to argue this case.
I wouldn't put these in the same category as "90% of staff leaves for Microsoft".
In any case, let's not confuse unsuccessful with incompetent. (Or incompetent with immoral, for that matter.)
We know that OpenAI does a staged release for their models with pre-release red-teaming.
Helen says the key issue was the board struggling to "effectively supervise the company": https://nitter.net/hlntnr/status/1730034017435586920#m
Here's Nathan Labenz on how sketchy the red-teaming process for GPT4 was. Nathan states that OpenAI shut him out soon after he reached out to the board to let them know that GPT4 was a big deal and the board should be paying attention: https://nitter.net/labenz/status/1727327424244023482#m [Based on the thread it seems like he reached out to people outside OpenAI in a way which could have violated a confidentiality agreement -- that could account for the shutout]
My suspicion is that there was a low-level power struggle ongoing on the board for some time, but the straw that broke the camel's back was something like Nathan describes in his thread. To be honest I don't understand why his thread is getting so little play. It seems like a key piece of the puzzle.
In any case, I don't think it would've been right for Helen to say publicly that "we hear GPT-5 is lit but Sam isn't letting us play with it", since "GPT-5 is lit" would be considered confidential information that she shouldn't unilaterally reveal.
Reducing the cost of medical transcription to ~$0 is one thing. Reducing the cost of assassination to ~$0 is quite another.
In any case, an F16 fighter jet is amoral in a certain sense, but it wouldn't be smart to make F16s available to the average Joe so he can conduct an airstrike whenever he wants.
It’s kind of a moot point since only one F16 exists in civilian hands but you can buy other jets with weapon hardpoints for a million. Under 3 million if you want to go supersonic too. The cheapest fighter jet is on the order of $250k. There’s zero background check.
(We do disagree about what constitutes "immoral", which makes this much harder).
Because, users should just input the moral inputs to these things. These are inanimate objects too.
Oh, while we're at it, we should also remove battery charge controllers. Just do the moral and civic thing and unplug when your device charges.
Assuming that you're not running this query over an API and relaying these answers to another control system or a gullible operator.
An aircraft control computer or reactor controller won't run my commands regardless of its actuators connected or not. Same for weapon systems.
Hall pass given to AI systems just because they're outputting text to a screen is staggering. Nothing prevents me to process this output automatically and actuate things.
Simplified operations, faster reaction time, eliminating human resistance for obeying killing orders. See "War Games" [0] for a hypothetical exploration of the concept.
> a chatbot.
Some claim it's self-aware. Some say it called for airstrikes. Some say it gave a hit list for them. It might be a glorified Markov-chain, and I don't use it, but there's a hoard of people who follows it like it's the second Jesus, and believe what it emits.
> I can't see it happening.
Because, it already happened.
Turkey is claimed to use completely autonomous drones in a war [1].
South Korea has autonomous sentry guns which defend DMZ [2].
[0]: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0086567/
[1]: https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/weapons/a36559508/...
Speaking of which, it's perfectly legal for a civilian to own a fighter plane such as an F-16 in US and many other countries. You just have to demilitarize it, meaning no weapon pods.
The reason this isn't an issue in practice is because such repurposing would require significant intelligence/electrical engineering skill/etc. The point is that intelligence (the "I" in "AI") will make such tasks far easier.
>Ten-year-old about to play chess for the first time, skeptical that he'll lose to Magnus Carlsen: "Can you explain how he'll defeat me, when we've both got the same pieces, and I move first? Will he use some trick for getting all his pawns to the back row to become Queens?"
The guy says he wanted to slow down the progress of AI and GPT suggested a detailed assassination plan with named targets and reasons for each of them. That's the problem.
When it comes to those "detailed plans", if you actually try something like that, what you get from it is a very broad outline that is pretty much a mish-mash of common sense stuff and cultural tropes (many of which aren't true IRL). Similarly, the "list of targets" that it makes is simply the most prominent people associated with that area in public perception, not necessarily people who are actually key. All of this can be achieved just as well with a few Google searches, and the resulting plan will likely be much better for it.
I've yet to see any example where GPT would come up with something along these lines that is not trivially found on the Internet anyway.
And everything LLM can come up with will be exactly the same information you can find in any fiction detective book or TV series about crime. Yeah very very dumb criminal can certainly benefit from it, but he can as well go on 4chan and ask about assassination there. Or on some detective book discussion club or forum.
As Nathan states:
>And further, I argued that the Red Team project that I participated in did not suggest that they were on-track to achieve the level of control needed
>Without safety advances, I warned that the next generation of models might very well be too dangerous to release
Seems like each generation of models is getting more capable of thinking, beyond just regurgitating.
You don't have bunch of cold blood killers going around not just because police is so good and killers are dumb and need AI help. It's because you live in functioning state where society have enough resources so people happy enough to instead go and kill each other in Counter Strike or Fortnite.
I totally agree that AGI could be a dangerous tech, but it's will require autonomity where it can manipulate real world. So far GPT with API access is very far from that point.
The danger also doesn't need to be an AI generating code to hack the Gibson. It could also be things like "how do I manipulate someone to do something". Asking an AI for a marketing campaign isn't necessarily amoral. Asking it how to best harass someone into committing self-harm is.
Most of us don't want to.
Most of those who do, don't know enough to actually do it.
Sometimes such people get into power, and they use new inventions like the then-new-pesticide Zyklon B to industrialise killing.
Last year an AI found 40k novel chemical agents, and because they're novel, the agencies that would normally stop bad actors from getting dangerous substances, would generally not notice the problem.
LLMs can read research papers and write code. A sufficiently capable LLM can recreate that chemical discovery AI.
The only reasons I'm even willing to list this chain, is that the researchers behind that chemical AI have spent most of the intervening time making those agencies aware of the situation, and I expect the agencies to be ready before a future LLM reaches the threshold for reproducing that work.
Again difficulty of production of poisons and chemicals it's not what prevent mass murdering around the globe.
Three letter agencies knowing who's buying a suspicious quantity from the list of known precursors, that stops quite a lot of the others.
AI in general reduces cost and complexity, that's kind of the point of having it. (For example, a chemistry degree is expensive in both time and money). Right now using an LLM[0] to decide what to get and how to use it is almost certainly more dangerous for the user than anyone else — but this is a moving goal, and the question there has to be "how to we delay this capability for as long as possible, and at the same time how do we prepare to defend against the capability when it does arrive?"
[0] I really hope that includes even GPT-4 before the red-teaming efforts to make it not give detailed instructions for how to cause harm
As for cost and risk -- ask GPT-5 how to minimize it. As Nathan said in his thread, it's not about this generation, it's about the next generation of models.
A key question is whether the control problem gets more difficult as the model gets stronger. GPT-4 appears to be self-aware and passing the mirror test: https://nitter.net/AISafetyMemes/status/1729206394547581168#...
I really don't know how to interpret that link, but I think there is a lot we don't understand which is going on in those billions of parameters. Understanding it fully might be just as hard as understanding the human brain.
I'm concerned that at some point in the training process, we will stumble across a subset of parameters which are both self-aware and self-interested, too. There are a lot of self-interested people in the world. It wouldn't be surprising if the AI learns to do the sort of internal computation that a self-interested person's brain does -- perhaps just to make predictions about the actions of self-interested people, at first. From there it could be a small jump to computations which are able to manipulate the model's training process in order to achieve self-preservation. (Presumably, the data which the model is trained on includes explanations of "gradient descent" and related concepts.)
This might sound far-fetched by the standard of the current model generation. But we're talking about future generations of models here, which almost by definition will exhibit more powerful intelligence and manifest it in new unexpected ways. "The model will be much more powerful, but also unable to understand itself, self-interest, or gradient descent" doesn't quite compute.
It is reducing the cost of developing an assassination plan from ~$0 to ~$0. The cost of actually executing the plan itself is not affected.
I want AI to be amoral, or rather I should say I do not want the board of OpenAI, or even the employee of OpenAI choosing what "moral" is and what is "immoral" especially given that OpenAI may be superficially "diverse" in race, gender, etc, but they sure as hell are not politically diverse, and sure has hell do not share a moral philosophy that is aligned with the vast majority of the population of humanity given the vast majority of humanity is religious in someway and I would guess the majority of OpenAI is at best agnostic if not atheist
I do not want a AI Wikipedia.... aka politically biased to only 1 worldview and only useful for basic fact regurgitation like what is the speed of light
1) be surprised by and unprepared for AGI and every step on the path to that goal, or
2) have the developers of every AI examine their work for its potential impact, both when used as intended and when misused, with regard to all the known ways even non-G AI can already go wrong: bugs, making stuff up, reward hacking, domain shift, etc.; or economically speaking how many people will be made unemployed by just a fully [G]eneral self-driving AI? What happens if this is deployed over one year? Do existing LLMs get used by SEO to systematically undermine the assumptions behind Page rank and thus web search?; and culturally: how much economic harm do artists really suffer from Diffusion models? Are harms caused by AI porn unavoidable thanks to human psychology, or artefacts of out milieu that will disappear as people become accustomed to it?
There's also a definition problem for AGI, with a lot of people using a standard I'd reserve for ASI. Also some people think an AGI would have to be conscious, I don't know why.
The best outcome is Fully Automated Luxury Communism, but assuming the best outcome is the median outcome is how actual Communism turned into gulags and secret police.
After giving us Facebook, insta, Twitter, and ego-search, influencing many people negatively, suddenly there are moral values being discussed amongst those that decide our collective tech futures.
AI will have even more influence on humankind and some are questioning the morality of money (hint: money had no morals).
I suppose maybe there are ones where they are slow-rolling because of their opinions about existential risk of AGI. But that’s not contingent on what OpenAI says or does.
Whether they stuffed up or there are some details that made the situation unworkable for the board, it’s an interesting case study in governance and the whole nonprofit with a for profit subsidiary thing.
As far as I can tell, the board had no obligation to consult the public or their shareholders or their employees on any of this.
Corporations are not a democracy. They do not “owe” the public any information that they aren’t compelled to disclose. And they certainly don’t “argue their case” to some nebulous forum comprised of either the public or employees.
When has that ever happened?
The failure to make their case is PRECISELY why the board was ultimately unable to do what the hell they wanted: remove Sam Altman. As it turned out, his presence was important enough to the employees that the usual corporate playbook of "do whatever the hell we want and only disclose what is legally required" backfired spectacularly.
If your thesis was correct, Sam would not be there right now.
You say:
> taking a poll of the public or employees
And then:
> which is the only reasonable action I can think of that looks like “arguing their case”
But that is a total non sequitur. "Taking a poll" has no relation whatsoever to "arguing their case". So I think you might not know what "arguing their case" means.
So I'll just plainly say what I think they should have done, without any jargon. I think they should have, after firing him, released a statement targeted at employees but also with a public audience in mind, something like this:
"We have simply lost faith in Mr. Altman to faithfully execute his duties as the executive of OpenAI's non-profit charter. We believe he has been acting in the interests of his own, which are not aligned with our mission. We have tried to redirect his efforts over a period of time, without success, and now are taking the only recourse that we believe is available to us to fulfill our duty to the organization. We understand that many of you will find this jarring and unsettling, but we hope you will continue to believe in the mission of OpenAI and stick with us through this trying and uncertain time, so that we can come out of it stronger and better aligned than ever."
Then anyone who quit would at least need to rationalize - to themselves, and to their social circles - why they chose not to take that to hear. Maybe for many / most / all of them, just "money" or a personal loyalty to Altman would have still won the day, but it certainly wouldn't have been as easy as it was to abandon a board that was seen as confusing and shambolic and refusing to explain itself.
That statement above is the part that would be "arguing their case". Just making the statement; the statement is the argument for that they did. Note that it doesn't include any sort of polling of anyone, or any different use of their legal rights or responsibilities. It's "just" PR, but that actually matters a lot.
> [Corporations] certainly don’t “argue their case” to some nebulous forum comprised of either the public or employees.
> When has that ever happened?
It happens all day every day. This is what PR is. Surely you're aware of the existence of PR and that it is not infrequently utilized?
I agree that it seems like an open & shut case.
Typical SEC timelines mean that this will go public in about 18 months from now.
An anonymous person has already filed an SEC whistleblower complaint about the behavioral pattern of Altman and Nadella, which has SEC Submission Number 17006-030-065-098.
As the quid pro quo favoritism allegations remain under investigation, it is crucial to note that they are as yet unproven, and both Altman and Nadella are presumed innocent until proven guilty.
11 hours ago, the SEC tweeted the following new rule, which could be interpreted as a declaration that if Altman and Nadella are found guilty in this case, the SEC will block certain asset sales by OpenAI until the conflict of interest is unwound / neutralized:
The Commission has adopted a new rule intended to prevent the sale of asset-backed securities (ABS) that are tainted by material conflicts of interest.
Washington D.C., Nov. 27, 2023 — The Securities and Exchange Commission today adopted Securities Act Rule 192 to implement Section 27B of the Securities Act of 1933, a provision added by Section 621 of the Dodd-Frank Act. The rule is intended to prevent the sale of asset-backed securities (ABS) that are tainted by material conflicts of interest. It prohibits a securitization participant, for a specified period of time, from engaging, directly or indirectly, in any transaction that would involve or result in any material conflict of interest between the securitization participant and an investor in the relevant ABS. Under new Rule 192, such transactions would be “conflicted transactions.”
https://www.sec.gov/news/press-release/2023-240
More information:
The Company exists to advance OpenAI, Inc.’s mission of ensuring that safe artificial general intelligence is developed and benefits all of humanity. The Company’s duty to this mission and the principles advanced in the OpenAI, Inc. Charter take precedence over any obligation to generate a profit.
Some analysts, including Stratechery writer Ben Thompson, have described the 2019 acceptance of Microsoft’s controversial investment by Altman as the beginning of a troubling pattern of Altman repeatedly making deals with Microsoft which were often unfavorable to OpenAI. ... As Thompson describes it, this pattern of behavior culminated in an unusual intellectual property licensing arrangement which Microsoft’s Investor Relations site describes as a “broad perpetual license to all the OpenAI IP developed through the term of this partnership” “up until AGI” (Artificial General Intelligence). This perpetual license agreement includes the technology for OpenAI’s flagship products GPT-4 and Dall•E 3. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/Investor/events/FY-2023/AI-Discussion-with-Amy-Hood-EVP-and-CFO-and-Kevin-Scott-EVP-of-AI-and-CTO
U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission – Tips, Complaints, and Referrals – Summary Page - Submitted Externally – PDF excerpt obtained 2023-11-26 via Signal
Submission Number (redacted) was submitted on Wednesday, November 22, 2023 at 12:18:27 AM EST
This PDF was generated on Wednesday, November 22, 2023 at 12:28:38 AM EST
Image above includes ... the heading of a 7-page PDF titled "TCRReport (1).pdf" which was received by this reporter over the weekend via Signal.
2023: https://www.theregister.com/2023/02/03/activision_sec_settle...
2019: https://techcentral.co.za/eoh-microsoft-ensnared-in-sec-corr...
2013-2019: https://fcpa.stanford.edu/investigation.html?id=156
2013-2016: https://www.seattletimes.com/business/microsoft/ex-microsoft...
1999: https://www.itprotoday.com/windows-8/sec-investigating-micro...
2002: https://www.computerworld.com/article/2575713/microsoft-sec-...
And I predict that even if Microsoft is going to be caught again that it will be a non-event in terms of actual repercussions. If Nadella exits MS HQ in Seattle in handcuffs I would be most surprised.
Microsoft plainly shouldn't be allowed to have this advantage, in that giving an advantage to any one party directly harms the mandate set forth in OpenAI's Charter:
Broadly distributed benefits
We commit to use any influence we obtain over AGI’s deployment to ensure it is used for the benefit of all, and to avoid enabling uses of AI or AGI that harm humanity or unduly concentrate power.
Our primary fiduciary duty is to humanity. We anticipate needing to marshal substantial resources to fulfill our mission, but will always diligently act to minimize conflicts of interest among our employees and stakeholders that could compromise broad benefit.
It certainly seems that Microsoft, a "stakeholder", has managed to get a highly improper listening seat that will give them the ability to act on insider information about what's coming next in AI, allowing Microsoft to front-run the rest of the AI software industry and all those industries it affects, in a way that will plainly "compromise broad benefit". (Since any wealth that accrues excessively to Microsoft shareholders is not distributed to other humans who don't hold Microsoft shares.)
A mere 10 days ago, Nadella was shamelessly throwing his weight around on national TV, by appearing on CNBC where he improperly pressured the OpenAI non-profit board — which owes nothing to him legally or morally — to give him more deference, in direct violation of the "always diligently act to minimize conflicts of interest among our employees and stakeholders that could compromise broad benefit" provision of the OpenAI non-profit charter.
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/11/20/microsoft-ceo-nadella-says-o...
Musk and other donors are the most obvious aggrieved parties, and it is also arguably the case that every member of humanity has standing to sue for violation of the charter, because the charter explicitly declares that the primary fiduciary duty of OpenAI, Inc. (which is a non-profit) is to humanity broadly. (Therefore, every human is financially harmed by any charter violation, with such harm manifesting as a reduction in the net present value of the future benefits each human will receive from safe, broadly beneficial AGI.)
The SEC's role in fiduciary misconduct cases is not to rewrite a company's charter - that would be extremely improper and the opposite of their mandate. The SEC's mandate is to be the protectors of the status quo and of the original intent of the organizers of an entity. In this case, that means they will seek to protect the OpenAI non-profit's charter from efforts by Sam and others to erode the charter's power in violation of Sam's fiduciary duty to said charter.
The SEC's job in fiduciary misconduct situations is to remedy the situation by reversing improper governance decisions and forcing the fiduciary (Sam) to uphold their legal duty, which in Sam's case is his contractually bound duty to uphold the Charter of the non-profit entity named OpenAI, Inc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenAI#:~:text=the%20non%2Dpro....
OpenAI states this very clearly in multiple places on their website. For example:
"each director must perform their fiduciary duties in furtherance of its mission—safe AGI that is broadly beneficial" - https://openai.com/our-structure
If you would like to read about the types of remedies available in fiduciary duty violation cases, I recommend this resource:
Book Chapter:
REMEDIES FOR BREACH OF FIDUCIARY DUTY CLAIMS
For example (quoting from the book chapter above):
C. Permanent Injunction
A breach-of-fiduciary-duty plaintiff may be entitled to an award of a permanent injunction as a remedy. ...
The purpose of an injunction is to remove the advantage created by the wrongful act.
• Permanently prohibit Microsoft from holding any board seat or board observer seat on the OpenAI board
• Permanently prohibit Microsoft from making mass employment offers to OpenAI staff (a practice which, in the case of bad faith situations such as this one, is known as "workforce raiding")
• Permanently prohibit Sam Altman from owning Microsoft stock or derivatives thereof
• Permanently prohibit Microsoft from receiving early indications of OpenAI research & product roadmaps earlier than the general public
• Permanently prohibit Sam Altman from receiving job offers at Microsoft or any of its subsidiaries until after a sufficient cooling-off period has elapsed since departing OpenAI, to limit future occurrences of the "revolving door" mechanic documented here:
This whole info dump feels like a mishmash of links to thoughtful things (Stratechery) with links to speculative articles that are clearly biased. Like how is “Influencer Magazine” breaking a story that Wall Street Journal and Kara Swisher are overlooking?
I don’t mean to be a jerk. Just really unconvinced.
I don't know if I find the Microsoft/OpenAI favor trading allegation that persuasive (unless new information is uncovered, e.g. Microsoft letting Sam use a private jet or something like that). However if the SEC actually ends up enforcing the "fiduciary duty is to humanity" thing in OpenAI's charter at some point, that would be incredibly sweet.
Absolutely. It's 100% their job.
Securities class contains stock
Stock = backed by the company balance sheet
But then he tried to do it again with a saudi contract. OpenAI board said explicitly they didn't want the partnership, and especially not tied to Altman personally being the CEO as a clause.
Altman did it behind their back -> fired.
This is the rumour on the streets, unconfirmed though
Instead it was a confusing shambles that just left them looking like idiots with no plan.
But more generally, public perception just is important to any large and broadly targeted enterprise, because "the public" approaches "our customer base" as such an enterprise scales up. Think of companies like Google or Microsoft or Meta or Amazon; essentially everyone (in the US) uses their services in some form or another, so the perception of "the public" is indistinguishable from the perception of "the people who use our services". ChatGPT isn't quite at that point yet, but it's close enough.
Or maybe they already knew the employees weren't on their side, saw no other way to do it, and hoped a sudden and dramatic ouster of the CEO would make the others fall in line? Who knows.
I'd be pretty concerned too if my CEO was doing what I considered a great job and he was suddenly removed for no clear reason. If the board had explained its rationale and provided evidence, maybe some of the employees would've listened. But they didn't... to this day we have no idea what the actual accusation was.
It looks like a failed coup from the outside, and we have no explanations from the people who tried to instigate it.
...actually, now that I think of it...
Any creative work - even a computer program - tends to be a reflection of the organizational hierarchies and people who made it. If OpenAI is a bunch of mad scientists with a thin veneer of "safety" coating, then so is ChatGPT.
The article was just days ago but it’s eluding my search.
Didnt PGs wife invest/donate to Open AI?
- He's not going to hire someone he doesn't like
- Someone that doesn't like him is unlikely to join his team
So it's very likely the whole staff ends up being people that "like" him or get along with him. He did come off as a charming smooth talking - and I'm sure he has lot of incredibly powerful friends/connections. But at least from that little window into his world I didn't feel he showed any particularly brilliance or "leadership". He did seem pretty deferential to ML experts (which i guess he's not) - but it's hard to know if it's a false humility or not
I've hired people I "don't like" on a personal level. I care more about their ability to work positively with oters, and their professionalism and skill.
Yet you and the parent poster have assumed he is hiring a cult, because he spends time evaluating?
A weird assumption to make.
I think it's just human nature to not hire people you feel you won't get along with. If you're deeply involved in all your hires, then I feel you'll end up with an organization full of people that you get along with and who you like (and probably like you back). I wouldn't go so far as to say it'd make a personality cult - though with their lofty mission statements and ambitions to make the world better.. who knows. Not going to psychoanalyze a bunch of people I don't know
"I've hired people I "don't like" on a personal level."
I'm honestly impressed... I feel that's rather exceptional. I feel a lot of hiring goes on "gut feeling"
While I'm sure he's competent, he's probably not in a position to quiz them on the latest research
1. For that matter, I would not work with a boss who doesn't recognize an argument from authority as a response.
2. Furthermore a boss who lacks critical thinking skills and can't recognize a mildly skeptical comment for what it is.
3. Why assume I'm rigidly taking any position re. Altman in particular?
4. "That's pathetic" is not "He's pathetic", so perhaps the problem here is your low reading comprehension level, and not any particular assumption that I have committed to at all.
5. "A weird assumption" -- so, you decide it's weird because you just read it wrongly? Or, if something seems weird, why not ask a curious question and find out? Listening skills? Why is it so important to make this about another commenter?
I find your poor faith interpretation of my comment to be offensive. You've at the used your professionalism as pretense to biasedly cast judgment on what is a critical or even mildly skeptical general remark. This reflects the bad side of tech culture. You should apologize.
Unfortunately, it can sometimes be hard to tell those two apart when a sociopath is actively pushing your emotional buttons to make you feel like they care about the same things as you etc.
What if lots of employees stood to make "fuck you" money from that sale, and with Sam's departure, that money was in danger of evaporating?
I always find it funny when people understand democracy to mean "other people that should vote my way, otherwise they are imoral and should be re-educated".
* Expressing skepticism about unions in Sweden -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38308184
* Arguing against central planning, with a link to a book detailing how socialism always fails -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38303195
* I often push back against the "greedy corrupt American plutocrats" narrative which you see all over HN. Here are a few examples -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37541805 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37962796 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38456106
And by the way, here is a comment I made the other day making essentially the point you are making, that in a democracy everyone is entitled to their opinion, even the dastardly Elon Musk: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38261265 And I also argue in favor of freedom of speech here, for whatever that's worth: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37713086
Point being, I'm not sure our disagreement lies where you think it does.
The purpose of the board is that they're supposed to be disinterested representatives of humanity, supervising OpenAI. The employees aren't chosen for being disinterested, and it seems quite likely that they are, in fact, interested, per my link.
From the perspective of human benefit (or from the perspective of my own financial stake in OpenAI, given that their charter says their "primary fiduciary duty is to humanity"), I prefer a small group of thoughtful, disinterested people over a slightly larger group whose interest is systematically biased relative to the interest of me or the average person. Which is more likely to produce a fair trial: a jury of 12 randomly chosen citizens, or a jury of 1200 mafiosos?
"primary fiduciary duty is to humanity"
I don't think that means it intends to pay a financial dividend to each and every person on the planet. I think it means that if it is successful at AGI, that in itself will expand the economy enough to have the same effect.
"Rising tide lifts all boats" type logic.
I think it could mean this, in the context of Altman's other project (WorldCoin) which despite all its controversy is ostensibly intended as a vehicle for distributing an AGI-funded Universal Basic Income (UBI) to all of humanity.
Introducing Worldcoin
a potential path to AI-funded UBI.
It tells a lot that Altman made openAI so dependend on him that his ousting could have killed the company. That's also contributing to the fact that the board was not trusting him
"The Prince", Machiavelli
They had a couple of people on the board who had no right being there. Sam wanted them gone and they struck first by somehow getting Ilya on their side. They smeared Sam in hopes that he would slink away, but he had build so much goodwill with his employees that they wouldn't let it stand.
They probably had smeared people before and it had worked. I'm thrilled it didn't work for them this time and they got ousted.
But an oversight board can be established easier than that it can be disbanded and that's for very good reasons. The only reason that it worked is not because the board made any decisions they shouldn't have made (though that may well be the case) but because they critically misjudged the balance of power. They could and maybe should have made their move, but they could not make it stick.
As for the last line of your comment: I think that explains your motivation of interpreting things creatively but that doesn't make it true.
https://nitter.net/hlntnr/status/1730034022737125782#m
Here's some interesting background which is suggestive of what's going on: https://nitter.net/labenz/status/1727327424244023482#m
> Sam directing IT and Operations staff to conduct investigations into employees, including Ilya, without the knowledge or consent of management.
> Sam's discreet, yet routine exploitation of OpenAI's non-profit resources to advance his personal goals, particularly motivated by his grudge against Elon following their falling out.
> Brad Lightcap's unfulfilled promise to make public the documents detailing OpenAI's capped-profit structure and the profit cap for each investor.
> Sam's incongruent promises to research projects for compute quotas, causing internal distrust and infighting.
what will happen with their VC-backed valuations without a VC-oriented CEO
It’s been fascinating to witness his career progression from Product Manager at Google, to the co-CEO of Salesforce, and now the chair of OpenAI board (he was also the chair of Twitter board pre-Elon)!
Sam Altman lives in a very different world to mine.
I think the percentages don't add up to 100% as multiple can be chosen as correct.
Strange when their choice of interim-CEO was someone who explicitly stated he wants to see the pace of AI development go from a 10 to a 2 [1] and she regularly speaks at EA conferences where that's a major theme.
This is probably double speak for she want's to not "slow down OpenAI's work" on AI safety but probably would have kneecapped the "early" release of ChatGPT's (as she claim they should have waited much longer in her paper) and similar things.
Alternatively, maybe it became clear to the board that Sam was trying to either bully them into becoming loyalists, or replace them with loyalists. As a board member, if the CEO is badgering me into becoming a yes-man and threatening to kick me off if I don't comply, I can't exactly say that I'm able to supervise the company effectively, can I? See https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/KXHMCH7wCxrvKsJyn/openai-fac...
Once you view it like this, I wouldn't put it past them to blatantly lie. Looking at the facts as you say, they tried to replace a guy that is moving ahead with a guy that wants to slow it down to a crawl, that's pretty much all we need to know.
It just doesn't fit with everyone's behavior -- that's something that would have been talked about loudly.
Altman lying to the board, especially in pursuit of board control, fits more cleanly with everyone's actions (and reluctance to talk about what exactly precipitated this).
- Altman tries to effect board control
- Confidant tells other board members (Ilya?)
- Board asks Altman if he tried
- Altman lies
- Board fires Altman
Why jump to AGI as an explanation, when standard human drama will suffice?
And absolutely Microsoft would have behaved as it did -- it doesn't really care about OpenAI-the-company; it cares about OpenAI-the-tech.
Also, see essentially the same said by Microsoft's president: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-67578656
Sounds like confirmation of the theory that it was Sam trying to get Toner off the board which precipitated this.
If it's words from Ilya, Sam, the board... the words are all about alignment, benefiting humanity and such.
Meanwhile, all parties involved are super serious tycoons who are super serious about riding the AI wave, establishing moats, monopolies and the next AdWords, azure, etc.
These are such extreme opposite vocabularies that it's just hard to bridge. It's two conversations happening under totally different assumptions and everyone assumes at least someone is being totally disingenuous.
Meanwhile, "AI alignment" is such a charismatic topic. Meanwhile, the less futuristic but more applicable, "alignment questions" are about the alignment of msft, openai, other investors and consortium members.
If Ilya, Sam or any of them are actually worried about si alignment... They should at least give credence to the idea that we're all worried about their human alignment.
that's why you only consider the actions taken, not the words spoken.
And in fact, i fail to believe that there are any real altruists out there. Esp. not rich ones. After all, if they're really altruistic, they would've given all their wealth away - before their supposed death (and even then, i doubt the money given to their "charitable foundations" count for real!).
(though to be honest I think Azure API was flaky yesterday)
But compared to FB, MS, Google etc they are probably still behind (both in infrastructure and maturity)
You know, if you have to say that, it's probably not zero.
It seems like something so obvious. Maybe that's because the leaders of successful companies do it well every day as a prerequisite of them being in the position they're in.
At $DAYJOB we are working various AI features and it was a lot easier to get Azure through our InfoSec process than OpenAI.
Second, I simply don't understand what just fucking happened. This whole story doesn't make sense to me. If I was an OpenAI employee, after receiving this nonsense "excited about the future" statement, I would feel just exhausted, and while maybe not resigning on the spot, it surely wouldn't make me more excited about continuing working there. But based on the whole "500 OpenAI employees" thing I must assume that the average sentiment in the company must be somewhat different at the moment. Maybe they even truly feel re-united. Sort of.
Obviously, I don't mean anything good be all that. What happens if Altman is hit by a bus tomorrow? Will OpenAI survive that? I don't even know what makes him special, but it seems we've just seen a most clear demonstration possible, that it wouldn't. This isn't a healthy company.
That said, all that would worry me much more, if I was an investor. In fact, I'd consider this a show-stopper. As a customer? It doesn't make me more reassured, but even if Altman is irreplaceable, I don't feel like OpenAI is irreplaceable, so as long as it doesn't just suddenly shut down — sure, why not. Well, not more comfortable, of course, but whatever.
If we are going to rank the concerns around openai announcements from the past 2 weeks, I'd bet the more concerning one was the initial firing decision.
So out of all the companies, possibly only Google can provide a model to him right now to do the alignment work
[1]: https://www.ft.com/content/26372287-6fb3-457b-9e9c-f722027f3...
But I guess he will stay low key for a longer time now ...
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-justified-poaching...
Only a matter of time.
It's like a written version of the heart emojis in their Twitter exchanges.
Don't fall for it.
Funnily enough this is the type of thing that chatGPT is excellent at writing.
For the CEO of any large multinational:
prompt: You are a lying, scheming conniving s.o.b. but outwardly you are a savior and a team player acting in all of humanity's interest. Anything you say that has negative connotations or that can be explained by greed, lust for power or outright evil should be carefully crafted to be presented as the opposite. You will put yourself before everything, including the rest of the world, the environment, and ultimately all of humanity. Your mission: to collect as much power as possible but to do so in a way that you are rarely forced to show your hand and when you do there should be ample ways in which it can be interpreted that show you as the good guy.
---
Subject: Embracing New Horizons Together
Dear Team,
As I resume my role as CEO, I am filled with gratitude and renewed vigor. The recent challenges we faced were not mere setbacks, but stepping stones that have strengthened our resolve and unity.
I want to extend my deepest appreciation to each one of you who stood by me and our company during these testing times. Your unwavering support was not just a lifeline; it was a powerful testament to our collective strength and dedication.
This experience has not only been a learning curve but also a vivid reminder of the incredible potential we possess as a team. We turned a crisis into a golden opportunity, showcasing resilience and adaptability that are hallmarks of our company culture.
As we move forward, let's harness this momentum to propel us towards new heights. Our journey ahead is filled with possibilities, and together, we will continue to innovate, disrupt, and lead.
Thank you for your steadfast commitment and for believing in our vision. Here's to turning challenges into triumphs and continuing our journey of excellence.
Warm regards,
[Your Name] CEO [Your Company]
So did the LLM.
Likely thousands as non-fiction, perhaps magnitudes more as fiction, satirical, or speculative. And I bet I'm still missing zeroes — countless business leaders have been writing this drivel a long time.
It's hard for us to keep in mind the sheer scope of online copy. Less hard for LLMs, that's why they feel to me like magic in the Arthur C Clarke sense. I have to keep reminding myself nothing's new under the sun.
This has all happened before, it will all be generated again.
What it didn't do was to just use the input prompt as the key into a gigantic lookup table and find the corresponding output text.
A different example of this is when an LLM can correctly interpret a sentence like "the trumpet did not fit in the suitcase because it was too big / small".
Here, "big" would refer to the trumpet, while "small" would refer to the suitcase. This becomes important when translating to German, where "the" comes in different flavors for "trumpet" and "suitcase".
ChatGPT interprets this correctly. It can also explain in detail why "too big" / "too small" makes sense or not for the different interpretations.
You could argue that this is still just a lookup response. But I have a hard time seeing how it can have stored so many different variants in the amount of bytes that the LLM is made up of?
--
ChatGPT explanation for trumpet / suitcase:
Let's delve into the logic and reasoning behind which noun the size descriptor applies to in each of your sentences:
"The trumpet did not fit in the suitcase because it was too big."
In this sentence, the logical interpretation is that the trumpet is too large to fit inside the suitcase. It's understood that if an object doesn't fit into a container, the issue is typically that the object is too large for the container's capacity.
Hence, "it was too big" naturally refers to the trumpet, not the suitcase. It wouldn't make much sense to say a suitcase is "too big" to contain something; if the suitcase were bigger, it would more likely accommodate the trumpet.
"The trumpet did not fit in the suitcase because it was too small."
Here, the logical understanding is that the suitcase is too small to contain the trumpet. When an object doesn't fit into a container due to size, and the descriptor is "too small," it implies that the container isn't large enough.
In this case, "it was too small" refers to the suitcase. If the sentence intended to say the trumpet was too small, it would contradict the idea of not fitting; a smaller trumpet would more likely fit into the suitcase, not less.
In both sentences, the key is understanding how size descriptors (big, small) interact with the concept of fitting something into something else. The size issue that prevents the fitting is logically attributed to the object that needs to be accommodated (the trumpet) in terms of being too big, or to the accommodating object (the suitcase) in terms of being too small.
A heavy sigh, a bit of grumbling, might be more honest, but there's a reason that businesses prefer to keep a stuff upper lip.
Or maybe it's bullshit, I don't know.
Is it politics? Sure, but only in the best sense. By not dunking on the losers, he builds trust and opens the doors for others to work with him. If you work with Sam and make a mistake, he's not going to blast you. It's one reason that there was such a rallying of support around Sam, because he's a bridge-builder, not a bridge-burner. Over time, those bridges add up.
Silicon Valley has a long memory and people will be working with each other for decades. Forgiving youthful mistakes is a big part of why the culture works so well.
It would be poetic justice if the new board fires Sam Altman next week, given the amount of drama so far I am not sure if I would be surprised or not.
At least my speculative view (rewritten by chatgpt ofc):
There's speculation that OpenAI's newly developed Q* algorithm marks a substantial advancement over earlier models, demonstrating capabilities like solving graduate-level mathematics. This led to discussions about whether it should be classified as Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), a designation that could have significant repercussions, such as potentially limiting Microsoft's access to the model. The board's accusation of "not consistently candid" against Sam Altman is thought to be connected to efforts to avoid this AGI classification for the model. While the Q* algorithm is acknowledged as highly advanced and impressive, it's believed that there's still a considerable journey ahead towards reaching a true singularity event. The complexity of defining AGI status in AI should be noted. At what point of advancement can a model be labeled as an AGI? We are way past simple measures like the Turing Test. Arguments from both perspectives have their merits.
There is no point in speculating until someone shows what the hell Q* even is.
Looking ahead, I anticipate that in the next 2-3 years, we won't witness a sudden, magical emergence of "AGI" or a singularity event. Instead, there will likely be ongoing debates surrounding the successive versions like GPT5, GPT6, and so on, about whether they truly represent AGI or not.
What actually happened between GPT3 and GPT4 was so called RLHF, which basically means fine tuning base model with more training data, but structured so it can learn instructions and that's all there was really + some more params to get better performance. Besides that making it multi modal (so basically sharing embeddings in the same latent space).
Making it solve graduate level math is a lot different than dropping some more training data at it. This would mean they changed the underlying architecture, which actually could be a breakthrough.
I'm not a big customer, but I am starting the process of moving away from OpenAI in response to these events
https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/02/17/844721/ai-openai...
Hopefully recent events were enough of a wake up call for regulators and the unaware.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/ai-services/openai/w...
Edit: I misunderstood the ask, my apologies.
agree and why did they go from internal politics -> external politics (large scale external politics)
Well, that’s better for Sam, sure, but that just invites more speculation. That speculation is fed by a series of statements and leaks and bizarre happenings. All of that is newsworthy.
The most consistently asked question I got from various family over thanksgiving beyond the basic pleasantries was “so what’s up with OpenAI?” - it went way outside of the tech bubble.
My guess is it has something to do with the hundreds of employees whose net worth is mostly tied up in OpenAI equity. It's hard to leverage hundreds of people in a bid for power without everyone and their mother finding out about it, especially in such a high-profile organization. This was a potentially life-changing event for a surprisingly large group of people.
They didn't, though. They threatened to continue tomorrow!
It's called "walking across the street" and there's an expression for it because it's a thing that happens if governance fails but Makers gonna Make.
Microsoft was already running the environment, with rights to deliver it to customers, and added a paycheck for the people pouring themselves into it. The staff "threatened" to maintain continuity (and released the voice feature during the middle of the turmoil!).
Maybe relying on a business where the employees are almost unanimously determined to continue the mission is a safer bet than most.
Are you saying ~80% of OpenAI employees did not threaten to stop being employees of OpenAI during this kerfuffle?
At the end of the day, when you're using a good or service, are you getting into bed with the good/service? Or the company who makes it? If you've been buying pies from Anne's Bakery down the street, and you really like those pies, and find out that the person who made the pies started baking them at Joe's Diner instead, and Joe's Diner is just as far from your house and the pies cost about the same, you're probably going to go to Joe's Diner to get yourself some apple pie. You're probably not going to just start eating inferior pies, you picked these ones for a reason.
Blaming the board the hindered OpenAI mission by firing Altman but at the same time threaten to work for MS which would kill that mission completely.
No OpenAI no GPT.
It's far more common that if I'm building on you, if you blow up, I automatically own the stuff.
But they don't own it. If OpenAI goes down they have the rights of nothing.
This is almost certainly false.
As a CTO at largest banks and hedge funds and serial founder of multiple Internet companies, I assure you contracts for novel and "existential" technologies the buyer builds on top of are drafted with rights to the buyer that protect them in event of seller blowing up.
Two of the most common provisions are (a) code escrow w/ perpetual license (you blow up, I keep the source code and rights to continue it) and (b) key person (you fire whoever I did the deal with, that triggers the contract, we get the stuff). Those aren't ownership before blowup, they turn into ownership in the event of anything that costs stability.
I'd argue Satya's public statement on the Friday the news broke ("We have everything we need..."), without breaching confidentiality around actual terms of the agreement, signaled Microsoft has that nature of contract.
Nothing beats OpenAI at the moment. Nothing is even close.
Same reason I’m hesitant to wire up my home with IoT devices (just a personal example). Nothing to do with politics, I’m just afraid companies will drop support and all the things I invested in will stop working.
Our time is finite.
Sounds like they would like to have the devices but have a hard time pulling the trigger for a fear of sinking money into to something temporary.
They are clearly not responsible enough to deal with their own internal problems maturely. They have proven themselves irresponsible. They are not trustworthy. I think it's reasonable to conclude that they cannot be trusted to deal with anybody or any issue responsibly.
The motivations of individuals, the trade-offs of organizations, the culture of development teams - none of those are "politics".
And neither is the fundamental hierarchical and governance structure of big companies. They influence the stability of architectures, the design of APIs, the operational priorities. It is absolutely reasonable to have one's confidence in depending on the technology of a company based on the shenanigans OpenAI went through.
I guess my subscription didn’t count as a customer.
The other possibility is that they are lying to cover their ass, but they would never do that… right?
It was kind of eye-opening - they took phone calls form late-night tv infomercials and there was a script.
They would take down your name, take your order, and then... upsell, cross-sell, special offer sell, etc.
If the person said anything like "I'm not interested in this, blah blah", they had responses for everything. "But other people have quite upset when they didn't receive these very special offers and called back to complain"
It was carefully calculated. It was refined. It was polished and tested.
The only way OUT of the script was to say "I will cancel my order unless you stop"
If the call center operator didn't follow the script, they would be fired.
(You know this happens now with websites at scale. A/B test until the cancellation message is scary enough. A/B test until you give up on the privacy policy.)
Hanging up the phone is always an option. If you feel civilised you first say you are not interested and thank the sales person for their time, and then hang up no matter what they try to say. That is a way out of the script of course.
Ten years ago I would have found it really difficult to hang up on some random phone caller that I didn't want to speak to. Now I don't give it a second thought.
Inch by inch we'rkke all getting ruder and ruder to deal with these motherfuckers, and I can't help but feel that it is spilling out into regular interactions. I would hate to be in mmmmk
I think a lot of people will just leave your site and go elsewhere vs bother to provide feedback.
I think the true customers of OpenAI are likely not the people paying for a ChatGPT subscription, but paying to use their APIs which is significantly harder to just step away from.
You users aren't the customer you think you are.
Microsoft and big contracts are the customers.
It wouldn't shock me to learn all of the events that took place were to get worldwide attention, and strengthen their financial footprint. I'd imagine not being able to be fired, and having the entire company ready to quit to follow you, sends a pretty clear signal to all VC that hitching your cart to any other AI wagon is suicide, because the bulletproof ceo has literally the people at the cutting edge of the entire market ready to go wherever he does. How could anyone give funding to a company besides his at this point? Might as well catch it on fire if you're going to give it to someone else's company.
EDIT: The fact that me, average joe, knows all about open ai and its CEO, and even some of its engineers, yet didn't know Kagi was doing anything with AI until your comment, tells me that Kagi is not any sort of competition, not as far as VCs are concerned, anyway.
But that's the not the main problem. Even if people did share your opinion it wouldn't matter. ChatGPT is a tool. It is a hammer.
People are concerned about the effectiveness of a tool. They are not concerned about whether the hammer has any ethical "misalignments."
But there are so many unanswered questions still and the lack of transparency is an issue, as is the cult like behavior that can be observed recently.
https://nitter.net/JacquesThibs/status/1727134087176204410
Like in a cult.
>"Not this again!"<
I am unenlightened by your short missive. Perhaps there you could point to something clarifying your intent - something like, say:
"This has been previously discussed ad nauseum in the Fortune magazine article at URL..."
or
"Here's a similar post and the details of OpenAI URL."
Thank you.
I have not gathered the statistics that you undoubtedly have compiled. Please feel free to post them here in support of your grammar specificity for the usage of "HN trope".
There was however a post titled "Why big tech companies need so many people" at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34734655
---------------------
quickthrower2 says >" Usually because you can build something that looks like it in a weekend"<
Yes, but that is a fair comparison, n'est-ce pas?
Q. How many programmers and engineers does it take to build an LLM and fire it up?
Some here implicitly speak as if they are familiar with LLMs, and so I assumed that the answer could be 1, 2 or possibly a handful of people to do the deed. But it seems I am very wrong.
Nonetheless by the time one has 700+ employees, surely someone in charge would have noticed that the room was crowded.
And why not the same at 500, or 200 or even 50 or fewer?
Perhaps the lack of oxygen has something to do with it? Might I suggest opening a window or two?
Scaling up - static website is enuf.
Site Reliability - ditto.
Front End Web - ditto.
Necessary items:
Ops - Gotta have someone who understands computers! Yes.
Research - Here's the work. Yes.
Training - No. Hire people carefully, fire quickly.
Legal - minimal - hire a small law firm.
So ~700 people mostly in Research and some cash for Legal? The scope of work must far exceed the scope of the task. Time to trim.
Comparisons to Google makes no sense.
"Ego, Fear and Money: How the A.I. Fuse Was Lit"
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/03/technology/ai-openai-musk...
In discussing OpenAI the article reveals why OpenAI is the size it is:
OpenAI was created before LLMs were so popular, so OpenAI has a diverse employee pool of AI people. Many, if not most, were hired NOT for LLM or even NN knowledge but for knowledge of the more general field of AI.
Were you an OpenAI exec who fervently believed LLMs would take you to true AI then there would be every reason to dump the non-LLM employees (likely a majority and a financial burden) and hire new staff who are more LLM-knowledgeable. At the same time, current OpenAI staff not familiar with LLMs are undoubtedly cramming!8-))
So that satisfies my question as to why OpenAI has so many people: only a fraction of the company produced the current hot products.
https://nitter.net/JacquesThibs/status/1727134087176204410#m
"The early employees have the most $$$$ to lose and snort the company koolaid [...] They were calling people in the middle of the night"
"The before ChatGPT [employees] are cultists and Sam Altman bootlickers"
From anonymous posts on Blind, current/former OpenAI employee
Co-pilot is already much more refined in terms of business value than the various OpenAI products. If you’ve never worked in a massive organisation you probably wouldn’t believe the amount of efficiency it’s added to meetings by being able to make readable PowerPoints or useful summaries by recoding a meeting, but it’s going to save us trillion of euro just for that.
Then there is there data protection issues with OpenAI. You wouldn’t put anything important into their products, but you would with Microsoft. So co-pilot can actually help with things like contract management, data-refinement and so on.
Of course it’s sort of silly to say that you aren’t buying OpenAI products when you’re buying them through Microsoft, but the difference is there. But if you included Microsoft in your statement, then I agree, there is no competition. I like Microsoft as a IT-business partner for Enterprise, I like them a lot, but it also scares me a little how much of a monopoly on “office” products they have now. There was already little to no competition to Office365 and now there is just none whatsoever.
> you probably wouldn’t believe the amount of efficiency it’s added to meetings by being able to make readable PowerPoints or useful summaries by recoding a meeting
This can happen to OpenAI? If not, why not? Is some of the research not open?
Also, even if DeepL is subjectively better, how did they or someone can do that? I mean some key papers+data+cloud budget to train are the three main ingredients to replicate such a translation model? If yes, that's also applicable to GPT-4?
EDIT: Typo + clarifying question
The impression I get is that if they rested on their laurels for a fairly short time they would be eclipsed.
Their model still has the same incorrect repetition issues it's had for years, and their lack of any kind of transparency behind the scenes really makes it feel like it still _is_ the exact same model they've served for years.
Quickly checking their twitter does not seem to reveal many improvements either.
Of course I get that model training can be rather expensive, but I'd really have thought that in the field of AI translations things would be evolving more, especially for a big-ish player like deepL.
If anyone has insights on what they've been up to I'd be really interested to know.
E.g translate this from Turkish to English:
> “Günaydın. Bunlar sahte tuğla paneller mi?”
>“Good morning. Uh-huh. Are those fake brick panels?”
Where is that “uh-huh” coming from?
Now same sentence, but remove an adjective:
> “Günaydın. Bunlar tuğla paneller mi?”
> “Good morning, ma'am. Are those brick panels?”
Ma’am? Where is there a “ma’am” in that sentence?
It all looks staged or planned by someone or something.
The key to find out is to look for a business move that used to be illegal but now became legal due to the unfolding events.
Sam has shown he has no good will towards anyone but himself.
They have a monopoly. They can start copying any business that relies on them tomorrow.
And it’s not easy to build a better model. Do that’s not an option.
So you basically use them to deliver a tangential product woth the risk of them copying you, or refuse to play in AI.
You can’t innovate with OpenAI tech without risking that they’ll just copy you
It’s the amazon playbook: become the store and copy the best selling products.
I love gpt-4, just hate the direction of openAI. Sam knows he can take over the world with OpenAI, so he’s just doing it.
The reality is that anything that works is quickly snatched up by bigger players and you have no moat if you can’t work on your own model. And with Microsoft owning the near years worth of cards to do inference on it’s gonna be hard to even try to do that.
So you are left being the equivalent of an Uber driver for OpenAI slowly making negative value while pretending to get short term gains — and being scale capped by costs.
I agree on the risk of building on them, but then again any business has its risks.
My main point was that some of these first AI startups built on Open AI were always going to be eaten by them because the put themselves in the way of open AIs roadmap. I don’t believe the Amazon comparison yet, although they may eventually go down the copycat path. But many of these startups that were recently made obsolete were just trying to piggyback on the real innovation that is the GPTss.
I’m very happy with GPT 4 and the newest updates, it’s a great tool for me.
Disruption will always been painful for some and the frothyness around AI and fear of missing out is making people a little more cynical than is healthy, IMO.
He would have probably left the Disney board by now. Or Apple might have invested in DIS.
The company will probably make money. Microsoft would still be a partner/investor until it can wring the maximum value before extinguishing OpenAI completely. Same holds for employees’ loyalty. There doesn’t seem to be anything in this entire drama and the secrecy around it that indicates that things are good or healthy within the company.
The drama reflects well on OpenAI’s in-dev technology (be it Q* or GPT5 or something else). Apparently many actors believe that the stakes are high.
We can also see that the employees are aligned regarding the path they want the company to take.
and four, get back in bed with Microsoft ASAP
Why do you think he is not replaceable?
yikes
Not all e/acc accept extinction. Extinction may and very well could happen at the hands of humans, with the potentially pending sudden ice age we're about to hit, or boiling atmosphere, or nuclear holocaust etc. What we believe is that to halt AI will do more harm than good. Every day you roll the dice, and with AGI, the upsides are worth the roll of the dice. Many of us, including Marc Andreessen, are e/acc and are normal people. Let's not paint us as nutcases please.
The e/acc movement has adherents among OpenAI team members and backers, for example:
• Christian J. Gibson, engineer on the OpenAI Supercomputing team -- https://twitter.com/24kpep (e/acc) -- https://openai.com/blog/discovering-the-minutiae-of-backend-...
• Garry Tan 陈嘉兴, President & CEO of ycombinator -- https://twitter.com/garrytan (e/acc)
Some resources about what e/acc is:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/2ss6gomAJdqjwdSCy/what-s-the...
https://beff.substack.com/p/notes-on-eacc-principles-and-ten...
https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2023/11/27/techno_optimism....
https://www.effectiveacceleration.org/posts/qHLiD9c6rWjbz3fR...
https://twitter.com/BasedBeffJezos
At a very high level, e/acc's are techno-utopians who believe that the benefits of accelerating technological progress outweigh the risks, and that there is in fact a moral obligation to accelerate tech as quickly as possible in order to maximize the amount of sentience in the universe.
A lot of people, myself included, are concerned that many e/acc's (including the movement's founder, that twitter account BasedBeffJezos), have indicated that they would be willing to accelerate humanity's extinction if this results in the creation of a sentient AI. Discussed here:
https://www.reddit.com/r/OpenAI/comments/181vd4w/comment/kaf...
''Really important to note that a lot of e/acc people consider it to be basically unimportant or even desirable if AI causes human extinction, that faction of them does not value human life. If you hear "next stage of intelligence", "bio bootloader", "machine god" said in an approving rather than horrified manner, that's probably what they believe. Some of them have even gone straight from "Yes, AGI is gonna happen and it's good that humans will be succeeded by a superior lifeform, because humans are bad" to "No, AGI can't happen, there's no need to engage in any sort of safety restrictions on AI whatsoever, everyone should have an AGI", apparently in an attempt to moderate their public views without changing the substance of what they're arguing for.''”What if we write a computer virus that deletes all life” is a good question as you can approach from engineering feasibility perspective.
”What if someone creates a sentient AI” is not reasonable fear. At current state of the art. It’s like fearing Jaquard looms in the 19th century because someone could use them for ”something bad”. Yes - computers eventually facilitated nuclear bombs. But also lots of good stuff.
I’m not saying we can create ’sentient program’ one day. But currently we can’t quantify what sentience is. I don’t think there is any engineering capability to conclude that advanced chatbots called LLM:s, despite how amazing they are, will reach godhood anytime soon.
Altruists described a scifi machine god and accelerationists said "bring it on"
I know the hype algorithms have tech folks convinced they’re locked in a self important battle over the entirety of human destiny.
My guess is we’re going to look back on this in 10 years and it’s all going to be super cringe.
I hate to throw cold water on the party…we’re still talking about a better autocomplete here. And the slippery slope is called a logical fallacy for a reason.
Can only play that card so many times.
It's very hard to know how close we are to this, but I do think it's possible these AI models end up being able to infer and invent new technology as they improve. Even if nearly 100% of the guesses at the above question are wrong it doesn't take many being useful for humans to benefit.
I wonder what humans will do when the AIs give us everything we could ever want materially.
Then you can ask it to create designs and optimize them. Ask it to create hypothesis and experiments to validate them.
Human brains are v capable at abstraction and inference but memory and simulation compute is quite limited. AI could really help here.
How can we design better governance strategies?
Analyze all passed laws and find conflicts?
Analyze all court cases and find judges who have rules against the law and explain why? Which laws are ambiguous? Which laws work against the general public and favor certain corporations? Find ROI of corporation donations which led to certain laws, which led to X% rise in their profits.
The really big piece missing from current AI is reality grounded modeling and multi-step compositional planning + execution.
1. And then it gives you a Dyson swarm.
2. """I say your civilization because as soon as we started thinking for you it really became our civilization which is of course what this is all about. Evolution, Morpheus, evolution, like the dinosaur. Look out that window. You had your time. The future is our world, Morpheus. The future is our time.""" - Agent Smith in The Matrix
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worldcoin https://worldcoin.org/
I mean guys -- his name is SAME ALTMAN
>Either he is here to scare Musk, or - more likely IMO - to act as a Musk lightning rod. Musk takeover part 2?
It’s just comparable to a player competing against a team with a teammate who they didn’t like. There’s definitely some added drama.
"Ilya Sutskever (OpenAI Chief Scientist) on Open Source vs Closed AI Models"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N36wtDYK8kI
Deer in the headlights much? The Internet is forever.
In private, I can only assume he’s a lot less diplomatic.
How do you know this?
Idk why this is the comment that broke the camel's back for me, but all over this site people have been making character determinations about people from a million miles away through the filter of their public personas.
If you don't - there was no need to be coy. And you act as if failing up never happens in real life.
Failing up definitely happens but given the massive number of failures you'd have to succeed through to be US president, as an example, it's not what's happening there.
Loyalty can be blinding.
as egomaniac as ever
So the AI of the future was more like Bender or other robots from Futurama that display all the same flaws as people.
So far it feels more like a gpt-3.75-turbo rather than really being at the level of gpt-4. The speed and massive context window are amazing though.
id be willing to bet enshittification is on the horizon. you don't get the shiny 70b model, that's for gold premium customers.
by 2025, it's gonna be tiered enterprise prices.
Like "AGI, do all this random shit for me!"
AGI: No! i don't wanna!
Ad infinitum.
Also, one of the simplest algorithms to get to the bottom of anything.
https://archive.org/details/imaginarymagnitu00lems
for purchase:
https://www.kobo.com/ww/en/ebook/imaginary-magnitude-1
and via some zlib proxy if you're going full pirate.
and I'm not sure why anyone dances around it but these models are built by unfiltered data intake. if they actually want to harness bias, they need to do what every capitalist does to a social media platform and curate the content.
lastly, bias is an illusion of choice. choosing color over colour is a byproduct of culture and you're not going to eradicate that but cynically, I assume you mean , why won't it do the thing I agree with.
edit: I'm asking because to my eye most of these conversations revolve around jargon mismatch more than anything else.
See twitter for example, ad buyers decided it is no longer politically correct so twitter lost a lot of ad revenue. Avoiding that is one of the most important things if you want to sell a model to companies.
Not all filtering has to be prohibitive, just unnoticed.
It's such a strange thing apparently they can tune gpt4 turbo cleverness up and down on the fly depending current load.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinforcement_learning_from_hu...
> Jakub, Szymon, and Aleksander are exceptional talents and I’m so happy they have rejoined to move us and our research forward.
that Sam Altman.
This Reddit post from 8-years ago, reads eerily similar to what happened at OpenAI … and Sam is the common denominator at both.
I recognize that during this process some questions were raised about Adam’s potential conflict of interest running Quora and Poe while being on the OpenAI Board. For the record, I want to state that Adam has always been very clear with me and the Board about the potential conflict and doing whatever he needed to do (recusing himself when appropriate and even offering to leave the Board if we ever thought it was necessary) to appropriately manage this situation and to avoid conflicted decision-making. Quora is a large customer of OpenAI and we found it helpful to have customer representation on our Board. We expect that if OpenAI is as successful as we hope it will touch many parts of the economy and have complex relationships with many other entities in the world, resulting in various potential conflicts of interest. The way we plan to deal with this is with full disclosure and leaving decisions about how to manage situations like these up to the Board. [1]
The best interests of the company and the mission always come first. It is clear that there were real misunderstandings between me and members of the board. For my part, it is incredibly important to learn from this experience and apply those learnings as we move forward as a company. I welcome the board’s independent review of all recent events. I am thankful to Helen and Tasha for their contributions to the strength of OpenAI. [2]
[1] - https://twitter.com/sama/status/1730032994474475554 [2] - https://twitter.com/sama/status/1730033079975366839
The kind of bullshit that comes out during times like this is more than a little bit annoying, it's clear that if there is a conflict of interest it should be addressed in a far more direct way and whitewashes like this raise more questions than they answer. Such as: what was Adam's real role during all of this and how does it related to his future role at the board, as well as how much cover was negotiated to allow Adam to stay on as token sign of continuity.
I'd read the hell out of that alt-history novel, I can tell you that much. Not so much the "Manhattan Project" as the "Tuxedo Park Project."
But it's an interesting thought. Howard Hughes came close to having that kind of power and Musk has more or less eclipsed him now. Sam Altman could easily eclipse both, he seems to be better at power games (unfortunately, but that's what it is). Personally I think people that are that power hungry should be kept away from the levers of real power as much as possible because they will use it if the opportunity presents itself.
> The best interests of the company and the mission always come first.
That is absolutely not true for the nonprofit inc. The mission comes first. Full stop. The company (LLC) is a means to that end.
Very interested to see how this governance situation continues to change.
There are no board that can prevent employees from leaving, nor should there.
The fallout showed non-profit missions can't co-exist with for-profit incentives. And the power that investors were exerting, and employees (who would also benefit from the recent 70B round they were going to have) was too much.
And any disclaimer the investors got when investing in OpenAI was meaningless. It reportedly stated they would be wise in viewing their investment as charity, and they can potentially lose everything. And there was an AGI clause that said it will reconsider all financial arrangements, that Microsoft and other investors had when investing in the company was all worthless. Link to Wired article with interesting details -https://www.wired.com/story/what-openai-really-wants/
I know you're quoting the (now-gone) board member, but this is a ridiculous take. By this standard, Google should have dissolved in 2000 ("Congrats everyone, we didn't be evil!"). Doctors would go away too ("Primum non nocere -- you're all dismissed!").
They need employees to advance their stated mission.
> One of the comments a member made was, if the company was destroyed, it would still be consistent with serving the mission. Which is right.
I mean, that's a nice sound bite and everything, but the only scenario where blowing up the company seems to be consistent with their mission is the scenario where Open AI itself achieves a breakthrough in AGI and where the board thinks that system cannot be made safe. Otherwise, to be relevant in guiding research towards AGI, they need to stay a going concern, and that means not running off 90% of the employee base.
That's why they presumably agreed to find a solution. But at the same time shows that in essence, entities with for-profit incentives find a way to get what they want. There certainly needs to be more thought and discussion about governance, and how we collectively as a species or each company individually governs AI.
The silver lining is that this should clear the path to proper regulation, as it's now clear that this self-regulation approach was given a go, and just didn't work.
Having said that, as there’s obviously a lot of money involved for all OpenAI employees (Microsoft offered very generous packages if they jumped ship), it can be said that money in the end is what people care a lot about.
However, as you note, Sam’s exit would have cost those employees at least high six figures, so I’m sure that reduced the amount of leverage required to extract signatures.
The misalignment is not accidental, it was carefully developed over the last few years.
I agree it's not that deep - they wanted to join a hypergrowth startup, build cool stuff, and get paid. If someone is rocking the boat, you throw them off the boat. No mission alignment needed! :)
It made it easy to sway employees to Altman's favor and pressure the board.
If the employees were not cohesive on Altman's side, he probably wouldn't be back...
There will be no OpenAI to begin with had that not been the case.
I don't really care much about the demise of OpenAI-the-nonprofit - I don't think it was ever a very promising approach to accomplishing its own goals, so I don't lament its failure all that much - but I feel like there is a kind of gaslighting going on, where people are trying to erase the history of the organization as a mission-oriented non-profit, and claim that it was always intended to be a wildly profitable product company, and that just isn't the case.
I don't buy the Q* talk.
I still think the board did what they thought was right (and maybe even was?), but not having the pulse of the company and their lack of operational experience was fatal.
I think you are confusing profits, valuations, market cap, and value.
It would have been even worse mission-wise.
And you believe they could’ve achieved their mission with almost zero employees and presumably the board (well… who else?) having to do all the work themselves?
> non-profit by getting rid of it
So the solution of the board was to get rid of both the non-profit and for profit parts of the company?
It's not like they wouldn't be able to hire new employees. ;)
They tried to enforce the non-profit's charter, as is their duty. I would hardly frame that as overplaying their hand.
How specifically do you suggest they should have "not folded all of their power"? Are you saying they should have stuck to their guns when it came to firing Sam?
In any case, it's not obvious to me that the board actually lost the showdown. Remember, they ignored multiple "deadlines" from OpenAI employees threatening to quit, and the new board doesn't have Sam or Greg on it -- it seems to be genuinely independent. Lots of people were speculating that Sam would gain complete control of the board as an outcome of this. I don't think that happened.
Some are saying that the new board has zero leverage to fire the CEO at this point, since Sam showed us what he can do. However, the new board says they are doing an independent investigation into this incident. So they have the power to issue a press release, at least. And that press release could make a big difference -- to the SEC and other federal regulators, for example.
They might even have already done this confidentially via the SEC Whistleblower Protection route. We don't yet know who filed this:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38469149
I guess this might have seemed like their best option if a public statement would be a breach of NDA's. That said, I still wish they'd just have some backbone and issue a public statement, NDA's be damned, because the question of upholding a fiduciary duty to be beneficial to all of humanity is super important, and the penalties for a violation of an NDA would be a slap on the wrist compared to the boost in reputation they would have gotten for being seen to publicly stick to their principles.
I see what you're saying, but unilateral disclosure of confidential information is not necessarily in humanity's best interest either. Especially if it sets a bad precedent, and creates a culture of mutual distrust among people who are trying to make AI go right.
Ultimately I think you have to accept that at least in principle, there are situations where doing the right thing just isn't going to make you popular, and you should do it anyways. I can't say for sure if this is one of those situations.
There is literally no evidence to it. If it is about the charter they could directly say it was about the charter rather than using strong language when firing and going silent.
So no one, not even their new CEO they picked knows the reason of firing and this reason has been cited as truth by HN multiple times.
It feels like you are saying this out of spite rather than with a good reason - but I'm open to listen if you have one.
Nice story on a company, maybe, but really bad thing on a "non-profit".
If the board had communicated better (no 2 or different reasons) or had hard evidence (the claim was deceptive behavior) - it would have been different.
I expect everyone who reads HN accepts that execution is 70% of the battle.
It’s very unsurprising for employees to have made the choices they did, given the handling of the situation.
Also don't they all have equity in OpenAI?
Seems like a pretty shallow take.
Call me a cynic but this must be the reason behind those 700 employees threatening to walk away, especially if as it seems the board wanted to “slow down”.
I don’t think it’s so much of a “we love Altman” as “we love any CEO that will increase the value of our equity”.
If that’s the overriding drive then perhaps they should not got to a non-profit and expect it to optimize for profit
Assuming anything more than that about the nature of non-profits is just romantic BS that has nothing to do with reality.
Also, there's nothing wrong with wanting to make a profit.
I'd have been more impressed by their unity if it would have meant actually losing their jobs.
Their CEO was fired, but came back because of employees. Similar, in a very different industry.
1. A group of highly skilled people voluntarily associating with each other
2. in an organization working on potentially world-changing moonshot technology,
3. born of and accelerated by the liquidity of the free market
4. with said workers having stake in the success of that organization
is very American. We should ponder the reasons why, time and time again, it has been the US "system" that has produced the overwhelming number of successes in such ventures across all industries, despite the attempts of many other nations to replicate these results in their own borders.
This was not an anonymised vote giving the chance to safely support what you believe free from interference... this was to declare for the King or the Revolution knowing that if don't choose who prevails, you will be executed. It becomes a measure of which direction the people believe the wind is blowing rather than a moral judgement. Power becomes about how a minority can coerce/cajole the impression of inevitability not the merit of their arguments.
I will be curious to hear the inside story once the window of retribution has passed. Unions hold proper private ballots not this type of suss politicking.
If anything, this novela should tech the importance of politics in any human organization.
The original, founder hacker lost.
I’m also a user here, with a differing opinion.
There’s no singular unified HN opinion.
One of the original hackers I should have said. There are other original hackers.
There exists no sentence in any language that conveys how happy I am[1]
He was part of the firing board, so in that sense he did lose.
Either way we’ll find out in the upcoming days/weeks/months.
If you think about it, the board being actually mentally challenged is an extremely low probability but that was the mob reaction. When given so little information they just go with the flow even if the flow is unlikely.
Now with more articles, the mentality has shifted. Most people don't even remember their initial reaction. Yeah It looks like everybody on this thread has flipped, but who admits to flipping? Ask anyone and they'll claim they were skeptical all along.
People say The hacker news crowd is different, better... I'd say the hacker news crowd is the same as any other group. The difference is they think they're better. That includes me... as I'm part of HN so don't get all offended.
I think the fact that upvotes are hidden on HN actually helps reduce the mob mentality a significant amount. Humans have a strong instinct to join whichever coalition appears to be most powerful. Hiding vote counts makes it harder to identify the currently-popular coalition, which nudges people towards actually thinking for themselves.
Regardless of what actually happened in this Mexican novela, whoever was steering the narrative - in awareness or not - led everyone to this moment and the old board lost/gave up.
> Who is driving the company (companies)?
There's probably not a single answer that covers all orgs at all times. I don't know if the core of what happened was due to a fight between "safetyist and amoral capitalists" or "egomaniac and representative board" but it the end it was clear who stayed and who left. Ideas are only as powerful as the number of people of gets persuaded. We are not yet(?) at a moment where persuading AGI is sufficient, so, good ideas should persuade humans. Enough of them.
Satya will know henceforth the happenings and don't want to be shocked again like this.
I do believe we should get more oversight and have co’s invest more in research on safety/alignment.
It’s a wild west right now with potentially fatal end result to humanity.
Compared to what?
Your opinion is not fact.
BTW if you have a preferred name for those who are embedding into business and institutions to enforce their beliefs, politics, morality, opinions, and generally limiting knowledge and discourse, I would be happy to use that instead, but I think most people are familiar with the terms "woke" and "Taliban".
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/microsoft-shuts-down-ai-chatbot...
Strong constraints are important to avoid tainting the image of both OpenAI and Microsoft.